The Scholar and the Gypsy

Trebizond was their starting-point, the late Roman and early medieval past of eastern Turkey was their quarry. James Howard-Johnston and Nigel Ryan first searched for three long-lost castles in remote country around the massive Bingol Dag, the Mountain of a Thousand Lakes, then ranged over the volcano-studded uplands near the Iranian and Soviet Borders where rival Armenian and Georgian princes once competed to outdo each other in the magnificence of their buildings. They observed the modern world which they encountered - Kurds, Turks and Georgians, bustling market towns, villages flanked by clusters of pyramidical piles of dung-pats and the omnipresent security police. The following year, they went to Istanbul, back to Bingol Dag, into the unspoilt interior of western Turkey where the fate of Byzantium was decided at the time of the Crusades, and finally to Bulgaria on the eve of the collapse of communism. This book is a blend of travel and history. It is woven together out of two very different accounts of the same experiences. The gypsy (Ryan) records the scholar's ways; the scholar (Howard-Johnston) listens to the gypsy's talk.